Electronic Book Review - burkehttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/burke
enTwo Gestures, While Waiting for a Thirdhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/libidinal
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<div class="field-item even">Victor J. Vitanza</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-11-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph">“The suggestion has been made - and this is certainly possible - that once humanity has returned to itself, it may no longer have a human form and thus appear as the fulfilled animality of <span class="foreignWord">homo sapiens</span>. The suggestion has also been made - and this is equally possible - that with the supremacy of the Absolute’s orientation toward the past, the fulfilled figure of the human may instead have the form of a book that forever gathers and recapitulates in its pages all the historical figures of humanity, such a book being a volume published by Goebhard of Bamberg in April 1807 under the title <span class="booktitle">Die Phänomenologie des Geiste</span> (<span class="booktitle">The Phenomenology of Spirit</span>). This - but not only this - is certainly possible.”<br /> -Giorgio Agamben, <span class="booktitle">Potentialities</span>, 125-26</p>
<p>This opening dis/orientation points to what I attend to in this essay. But I am not a Hegelian, right or left. But perhaps a post-Hegelian far left of what is Humanistically possible. And therein lies a third, if not a becoming-fourth, silent Gesture.</p>
<p>About “Gesture I,” the reader might think that I am not writing at all on the topic of this volume - un/namely, How technological e.utopianism (The Wild, Wild HyperWest, the “Reign of freedom”) has turned into a technological dystopia (A HyperDisney Property, “the Reign of necessity”). It is hoped, however, that the reader will come to see that “Gesture I” is about the end of the conditions for the possibilities of the binary e.utopia/dystopia. The end of any <span class="lightEmphasis">restricted</span> economy of idealism/materialism, necessity/freedom, or any dyadic or binary system. The ends of the conditions for control. Beings will - whatever beings would - prefer not to control. So as to begin to live fully without ressentiment.</p>
<p>My hope is that “Gesture II” will be read as an evocation to see (theorize) that the coming community of humanity will have, yet “no longer have[,] a human form.” By which I mean, “humanity” will have overcome the conditions of human/nonhuman but also overcome a technological posthuman(ism). I am not necessarily writing about cyborgs. I write, instead, about an involutionary becoming (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, <span class="booktitle">Thousand Plateaus</span> 238-39) without qualities and content (cf. Robert Musil’s <span class="booktitle">The Man Without Qualities</span>, wherein wo/man is “in between” subject/object). I write about what Giorgio Agamben refers to as “whatever beings” (cf. Agamben’s <span class="booktitle">The Man Without Content</span>, wherein wo/man is aesthetically - and yes, politically - not indifferent, but in-different). “Gesture II” is about humanity (human beings) having the form of a book that possibly becomes in “Gesture III” the Net, the Web. Perhaps the stupid Web, definitely the enchained or (k)noted Web. Or, what Hélène Cixous refers to as a third body.</p>
<h2>Gesture I. Some reWorkings of (the Event of) History</h2>
<p>My assemblages of <span class="lightEmphasis">theory-fictions</span> are un/namely</p>
<p class="longQuotation">* that Capitalism, as a so-called economic system, is on the verge of Being not what we ever thought it was;<br /> * that whatever Capitalism is - as ingenious and as virulent as it has been - it is undergoing a catastrophic metamorphosis;<br /> * that Capitalism is losing any sense of centrality, hence, authority and control in the old or the new.est economies (or even the Net or Web);</p>
<p>(A parenthetical explanation: This change in Capitalism is being brought about by shifts not only in political economies but also in discursive, libidinal, and all economies, which in turn are being brought about by a diminishing of the power of the negative [negation, negativity]. A diminishing, yet augmentation, as in values revalued, as in imminently reversible <cite id="note_1" class="note">I am purposely avoiding the use of “immanence” or “immanent,” as in “immanent reversibility,” and instead am calling on “imminent” to avoid the problem of the myth of presence and infinity.</cite> binaries becoming ternaries +. With Capital, no longer being capable of maintaining the form of a body. I am assuming, therefore - in a telegraphic style here, for time is running short - full discussion of the shifts in economies from</p>
<p class="longQuotation">1. a Nation-State Economy [a restricted economy] through<br /> 2. a Global (New) Economy [a limnal one] to<br /> 3. a General Economy [a “general economy”].</p>
<p>The difference (cum <span class="foreignWord">différance</span> then <span class="lightEmphasis">differend</span>) between the first and third economies, as G. W. Leibniz, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Hélène Cixous, et al., explain, is the difference between <span class="lightEmphasis">lack</span> [scarcity based on the binary] and <span class="lightEmphasis">excess</span> [exuberance unbased by the re/introduction of the radical, oscillating modal shifts that allow for the return of the excluded third + body]. A diminishing of the negative also brings about a <span class="lightEmphasis">general libidinal economy</span>:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">1. not one sex [male],<br /> 2. nor two sexes [M/F or F/M],<br /> 3. but an exuberance of sexes [M, F, Hermaphrodites, Merms, Ferms, etc.]</p>
<p>When the negative loses its control over possibilities and potentialites, the negative topoi of species (proper)-genus (common)-differentiae [diaeresis] no longer <span class="lightEmphasis">restrict</span> or sort out in order to hold things in their so-called <span class="lightEmphasis">proper places</span>. Things just flow and mix in <span class="lightEmphasis">general</span>, non-categorically. Remember Lyotard’s Marx in <span class="booktitle">Libidinal Economy</span>, bisexualized - becoming hermaphrodite - into old man and young woman, with Marx coming to understand his “work cannot <span class="lightEmphasis">form a body</span>, just as capital cannot form a body” [102; Lyotard’s emphasis]. Marx is caught in a libidinal flow, writing, not necessarily without end, the book.less of libidinal flows, from notes through papers to articles becoming chapters to <span class="booktitle">Capital I</span>, then <span class="booktitle">II</span>, then <span class="booktitle">III</span> and some ever more [96-97].</p>
<p>When a general economy causes all things to flow and mix in perverse ways - i.e., contrary to culture [ <span class="foreignWord">nomos</span> ], causes all things to flow but in a new dis/concert, then, as Hegel says, a “pure culture” or culture as perversion forms, wherein good and bad [or evil] implode and make for no difference, or rather make [for] in-difference [ <span class="booktitle">Phenomenology</span> 314-17]. But this flow and mix, these <span class="lightEmphasis">indifferentiae</span> do not lead to a radical nihilism, or to the notion that human beings can be whatever they wish; rather, as Agamben makes clear in terms of ethics/éthos, “there is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: <span class="lightEmphasis">It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality</span> ” (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 43; Agamben’s emphasis). In parallel fashion, each is “hir” own sex and each is the sum of the potential of “one’s own existence” or <span class="foreignWord">éthos</span> in one’s own <span class="foreignWord">éthea</span> (or the name that is no name of the place adjacent to common place). In this general flow-scape, human beings step out of Virgil’s Aeneid and into the threshold of Ovid’s book of changes, becoming the form of a sublime book that is not less a book than the world. Baudrillard has written:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Once the orgy was over liberation was seen to have left everyone looking for their generic and sexual identity - and with fewer and fewer answers available, in view of the traffic in signs and the multiplicity of pleasures on offer. That is how we became transsexuals - just as we became transpoliticals: in other words, <span class="lightEmphasis">politically indifferent and undifferentiated beings</span>, androgynous and hermaphroditic…transvestites of the political realm. [ <span class="booktitle">Transparency</span>, 24-25; cf. Agamben, <span class="booktitle">Community</span> 48-50]).</p>
<p>To recapitulate, before this long parenthesis, I claimed that Capitalism is losing any sense of centrality, hence, authority and control in the old or the new.est economies. To continue where I left off: I wrote:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">* that human beings have been living (more so dying, yet undergoing metamorphosis, returning to themselves) within the grandest of <span class="lightEmphasis">abstractions</span>, un/namely, that they create the world, create value;<br /> And now (contrary-wise), I write:<br /> * that human beings <span class="lightEmphasis">do</span> make value, <span class="lightEmphasis">but</span> they make it as human beings <span class="lightEmphasis">cannot not do</span>: they make it as creatures rotten with perfection! (see Burke <span class="booktitle">Language</span>, Ch. 1) That is, they establish congregation by way of segregation, or by way of a private, privileged finitude;<br /> * that human beings, though rotten with perfection, are nonetheless led by the imp of the perverse to the third degree…that is, they would be the personification of absolute infinity (infinitude);<br /> There is another way to get to this point.less concerning Who or What makes value and How all things move toward valuelessness: Unnamely,<br /> * that <span class="lightEmphasis">use-value</span> has become supplementary to <span class="lightEmphasis">exchange value</span>, contributing to the commodification of our lives, our history;<br /> (Marx writes: “Their [the exchanger’s] movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them” [Capital 1 167-68].) And yet the times, not necessarily restricted by commodification, are a-changing! We relate to each other - will have communicated with each other - as value itself metamorphosizes from</p>
<p class="longQuotation">1. <span class="lightEmphasis">use-value</span> through<br /> 2. <span class="lightEmphasis">exchange-value</span> to<br /> 3. <span class="lightEmphasis">sign-value</span> and now to what Baudrillard calls<br /> +. <span class="lightEmphasis">fractal-[assemblage]-value</span> [viral, radiant] [ <span class="booktitle">Transparency of Evil</span> 5].</p>
<p>Let me emphasize, this most radical change is continuing on to sign-value and then fractal-[assemblage]-value. And event.ually [as in a poetics of <span class="foreignWord">Ereignis</span> ] to what I will call <span class="lightEmphasis">whatever-value</span>. As Baudrillard claims, “we are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication” [“Ecstasy,” 130].)</p>
<p>But Why? Is this Happening? In this theory-fiction? I really do not know Why! Perhaps, un/namely,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">* that the nonpositive-affirmative <span class="lightEmphasis">essence</span> of matter <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span> to change [virally, radiantly];<br /> * that therefore “human beings” <span class="lightEmphasis">become</span> event.ually, by way of <span class="lightEmphasis">whatever-value</span>, posthuman [assemblage] matter;<br /> * that the end of man and woman (their dyadic finitude) of meta/physics is upon us, just as the end of philosophy (its finitude) has been upon us;</p>
<p>Perhaps, a better answer to the question Why? is un/namely</p>
<p class="longQuotation">* that human beings will event.ually become - when humanity returns to itself - posthuman not because of “technology.” Or specifically because of “cybernetics,” but by way of radically negated (i.e., denegated) <span class="lightEmphasis">possibilities</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">potentialities</span>;</p>
<p>(Most writing on technology still lingers in a Victorian, Industrial Revolutionary notion of technology. And most, if not all, “critiques” of virtuality, new economy, and vivisystems [as, e.g., put forth against (contra to) such thinkers as Kevin Kelly] recapitulate the same misreadings by way of a Victorian terministic and a Wienerian cybernetics screen. With the end of technologized cybernetics comes now the new task of reThinking - not cybernetics - but Leibnizean modalities of <span class="lightEmphasis">possibilities</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">potentialities</span>.)</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">In tiny sums</span>: Negation is withdrawing (see Vitanza, <span class="booktitle">Negation</span>). The conditions for centralized authority, therefore, incrementally will have passed away. Binarisms are imploding and then dispersing. To be regathered in trans-radical-multiplicities. (Into Third figures, other than genus and species.) Without recycling (<span class="foreignWord">ricorso</span>), though oscillating modally back to One and two. After the orgy, after <span class="lightEmphasis">use-value</span> has made the long metamorphosis to <span class="lightEmphasis">whatever-value</span>, there will be no return to “use” or “exchange.” Only “Ecstasy.” In a General economy. The “new man” that Marx had expected - and would still expect - will be, but not as, heretofore, expected. It is not the content or qualities of freedom over necessity (necessity/freedom) in human beings that must be recovered in their so-called authenticity, but it is the discovery of the removal of such (all) things as they are or would be. The “Would-BEs” (the bourgeoisie) are passing. The “Workers” (the proletariat), passing. Into a General economy (Bataille). A genus-less (class-less) and, more so, species-less <span class="foreignWord">socious</span> (a nonhuman coming community), a whatever-singularities community, will have form(less)ed. Whether or not this community will be</p>
<p class="longQuotation">1. a private, privileged finitude or<br /> 2. a nightmarish, absolute infinitude or<br /> 3. a third possibility of an infinite finitude, “a community of finitude” (Nancy, Inoperative 27; cf. Sense 29-33)<br /> …remains to be seen…</p>
<h2>Gesture II. Some rePlayings of (the Event/s of) the Body</h2>
<p class="longQuotation">“…the hand’s gestures [ <span class="foreignWord">Gebärden</span> ] run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent”<br /> -Martin Heidegger, <span class="booktitle">Thinking</span>, 16</p>
<p>Recently, I’ve become interested in the thought of Giorgio Agamben. In particular, his book <span class="booktitle">The Coming Community</span>. My interests lie in specifically how to transform sub-jectivity into its third terms while not denegating it beyond its being an effectual political agent. I am interested in what Agamben calls “whatever beings” (<span class="foreignWord">quodlibet</span>) or “whatever singularities.” Whatever beings are paraproductions of radically denegated possibilities and potentialities. Specifically, in triadic terms of</p>
<p class="longQuotation">1. Subjects (active) 2. Objects (passive) 3. “whatever beings” or “whatever singularities” (radical passivity [cf. Wall]).</p>
<p>As I have said, whatever beings are not particular (species) nor general (genus); instead, they are a set that is not a set, setless of radical singularities that are not in the <span class="lightEmphasis">realm of being</span> but in the <span class="lightEmphasis">relation of being</span> or presencing. But for now, we must ask, How did the advent of whatever beings come about? In dis/order to intuit this question, we need first to understand what attempts to hold subject-object, species-genus, together. We need to understand the schematic-productive process itself, which determines potentiality and, and therefore, what is possible. We must understand negation itself.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Genus-species analytics, or the realm of being</span>: The scheme of production, not unfamiliar to school children, takes this traditional manner.ism: The defining (limiting) process, according to Aristotelian logic, is formalized as <span class="lightEmphasis">species</span> (to be) <span class="lightEmphasis">genus</span> (that) <span class="lightEmphasis">differentiae</span>. Example: Aristotle tells us in <span class="booktitle">Generation of Animals</span>, “The female is…a mutilated male” (737a.27-28). Female is the species; a mutilated male is the genus. And you can guess what is implied in the differentiae! For Aristotle, there is only one sex! Therefore, what we can see in this definition is that <span class="lightEmphasis">what is possible</span> is grossly limited, according to the logic of exaggerated exclusion, to a species in a genus that differs from all other species–but there is no other in that genus. Some thing “is” always something by virtue of what it is <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> (cf. Burke’s paradox of substance). What such thinking rules out as a possibility is <span class="lightEmphasis">one’s own sex</span>.</p>
<p>For Agamben, this realm of being, defining, limiting, is what concomitantly determines <span class="lightEmphasis">what is possible</span>. Hence, Agamben looks outside of the genus (common), looks at the excess, leftovers, remainders, for the excluded possibilities, potentialities. He looks, in other words, at the wider, more inclusive, beings of possible relations. And in finding what he finds in the excess, he attempts to represent the heretofore unrepresentable by way of a “third figure” that he calls <span class="foreignWord">indifferentiae</span> (or “in-difference” towards, an undifferentiation between, species-genuses analytics) or by another he identifies historically as <span class="foreignWord">maneries</span>, manare (which translates as “a manner of rising forth,” “originally engendered from its own manner”) that are multiple singularities (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 27-28). This third figure of <span class="foreignWord">indifferentiae</span> (i.e., in-difference against the <span class="foreignWord">differentiae</span>) parallels Derrida’s notion of <span class="foreignWord">différance</span> and Lyotard’s <span class="foreignWord">differend</span> as well as Nancy’s (k)noting (<span class="booktitle">Sense</span> 103-17).</p>
<p>For Agamben “difference” must be <span class="lightEmphasis">set aside</span> (the realm of being) in dis/order to realize What is potentially possible outside of what goes for the possible (the relation of being). Agamben sees all that does not count or qualify as content, nonetheless, as a paracontent or parameaning, which is against (not contra to, but alongside) meaning. Again, it is “one’s own” in one’s own <span class="foreignWord">éthea</span>, the place that is alongside (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 43). Agamben writes about “the Greek term, for example: <span class="foreignWord">para-deigma</span>, that which is shown alongside”:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">[T]he proper place of the example is always beside itself, in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds…It is the Most Common that cuts off any real community. Hence the impotent omnivalence of whatever being. It is neither apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation. These pure singularities communicate only in the empty space of the example, without being tied by any common property, by an identity. They…are the exemplars of the coming community.” (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 10-11)</p>
<p>This paracontent and parameaning, though outside, is refolded or untied and re[k]noted inside. The refolding is perpetually refolded, a perpetual re-placing-into-relation. The question now in terms of resistance is:</p>
<p>How can these third figures be politically effective?</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Towards a new rebeginning, or the relation of beings</span>: I want to focus on Agamben’s exemplary “whatever beings” at Tiananmen Square and ask the question of politics in relation to an Informatics of Resistance. I will discuss <span class="foreignWord">Ereignis</span> (the event of Appropriation) and its <span class="lightEmphasis">communicative model</span> as it is growing out of “whatever value” into a “whatever politics.” The paramodel is one-cum-a-radical multiPLIcity of gesturing. The model is the WEB enchained, perpetually refolded, re-tied or -[k]noted. (And yet, what I am attending to is not only the Web!) Hence I will be talking about what Agamben refers to as “the new body [or realm] of humanity” (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 50).</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">@TiananmenSquare</span>: Agamben asks: “What could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist [i.e., as a species belongs to a genus])…but by belonging itself? ” (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 85). But for “us” this belonging - or any thing called a politics based/less on this belonging - is so difficult to understand since it is a belonging without a predisposition or State, a politics without taking a stand; after all, the very word “understand” itself is a <span class="lightEmphasis">stasis</span>, <span class="lightEmphasis">status</span>, State word. (See Burke 21, 23.) Whatever singularities have no understandings. They do not ask or demand or fight for recognition (Hegel, Kojeve). Among themselves. Or with “us.” Agamben reflects more:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May [Tiananmen] was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict…).</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. This has nothing to do with the simple affirmation of the social in opposition to the State that has often found expression in the protest movements of recent years. Whatever singularities cannot form a <span class="foreignWord">societas</span> because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition. (85-86)</p>
<p>The key words are “determinate contents,” “demands,” “identity” and “recognition.” The presence of these words and the absence of what they conceptualize in the students signal that the Hegelean and Kojevean principles of subject/object in a struggle unto death for recognition are no longer present - the principles are without quality and content - since the determinate negation has been set aside for the absolute, or abstract, negation (see Hegel, <span class="booktitle">Phenomenology</span> 51; Vitanza, <span class="booktitle">Negation</span> 82-86), in other words, since subjectivity/objectivity has been <span class="lightEmphasis">set aside</span> for a <span class="lightEmphasis">Third</span> as “humanity” or what Agamben calls whatever singularity or sovereignty. (It can also be said that this <span class="lightEmphasis">being set aside</span> for the absolute, or abstract, negative is parallel to, if slightly different from, the Heideggerian <span class="foreignWord">Ereignis</span> [the event of Appropriation], to which I will return.) Agamben continues:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">What the State cannot tolerate in any way…is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">A being radically devoid of any representable identity [without references] would be absolutely irrelevant to the State…Whatever singularity…is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear. (86-87)</p>
<p><span class="foreignWord">Ereignis</span> (event): In a gesture, Agamben writes: “Whatever…is the event of the outside” (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 67; Agamben’s emphasis). This event as it is im/properly named (<span class="foreignWord">Ereignis</span>) is the Heideggerian event of the withdrawal of Being (assurance, foundations, of meaning and communication), or what I call the withdrawal of the negative (see Heidegger <span class="booktitle">On Time</span>; Vitanza “Hermeneutics”). Agamben explains: “what takes place is simply a movement of concealment without anything being hidden or anything hiding, without anything being veiled or anything veiling - pure <span class="lightEmphasis">self-destining without destiny</span>, simple abandonment of the self to itself” (<span class="booktitle">Potentialities</span> 131; Agamben’s emphasis).</p>
<p>But this event is, rather than simply the withdrawal of Being, the event of Appropriation. (Expropriation of self to itself.) What Heidegger sees is the entry of Thinking into the event of the end of withdrawal’s history. Appropriation - as for Heidegger, so for Agamben - is not the <span class="lightEmphasis">realm</span> of Being (of the early <span class="booktitle">Being and Time</span> 1926), but the relation of Being (of the later <span class="booktitle">On Time and Being</span> 1969). Heidegger writes: “Being [now] means: presencing, letting-be-present: presence” (<span class="booktitle">On Time</span> 10). Being - set loose from metaphysics (assurance, foundations), yet ever near it - is <span class="lightEmphasis">as</span> in beings appropriated to each other, or <span class="lightEmphasis">as</span> in beings abiding alongside each other (10-13, 19-24). Or as Nancy keeps insisting, <span class="lightEmphasis">as</span> in beings re(k)noting in relation to each other (<span class="booktitle">Sense</span> 103-17).</p>
<p>The event of Appropriation is the moment of possibilities, potentialities. Whatever singularity, Agamben says, is without identity, is neither determinate nor indeterminate (no simple binary); “rather it is [a third alternative] determined only through its <span class="lightEmphasis">relation</span>…to the totality of its possibilities [ <span class="lightEmphasis">presencing</span> ]” (<span class="booktitle">Potentialities</span> 67). We might say that the event is the moment of the possibility of whatever singularities. This possibility, without the negative of the realm of being, hence is a potentiality comparable to a post-Leibnizean compossibility with various incompossibilities and their vicedictions (<span class="booktitle">Theodicy</span>). <cite id="note_2" class="note">The term “vicediction” is substituted for the term and concept “contradiction.” For Leibniz there are not contradictions, only vicedictions, across incompossible worlds.</cite> This “totality” as such can only reside on the outside. The Task is to “Think” of it this way: All of meaning, made by negation, has by way of its various forms in the History of Being/s, finally been emptied outside.</p>
<p>Earlier I said “outside” was owing to defining (making meaning by exclusion). Outside was, still is, the place of waste. Non-meaning. Now, I can say, however, <span class="lightEmphasis">outside</span> is the experience ” ‘at the door’…’at the threshold’ ” (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 68). “The outside is not another space that resides beyond a determinate space, but rather, <span class="lightEmphasis">it is the passage</span>, the exteriority that gives it access…The threshold is not…another thing with respect to the limit; it is, so to [gesture], <span class="lightEmphasis">the experience of the limit itself</span> [i.e., of infinite finitude], the experience of being- <span class="lightEmphasis">within</span> [Appropriation] an <span class="lightEmphasis">outside</span> [Expropriation]. The <span class="foreignWord">ek-stasis</span> is the gift that singularity gathers from the <span class="lightEmphasis">empty</span> hands of humanity” (68; my emphasis). The <span class="foreignWord">ek-stasis</span> is “multiple common place,” “the proper name of this unrepresentable space…the space adjacent [alongside, as an aside]” (25; cf. ” <span class="booktitle">chora</span>,” 14).</p>
<p>This communication of the event of Appropriation by way of gesturing with language, or asides, is part of the message-event to be experienced. (I have been, after all, gesturing with asides.) There is no analytic or synthetic language of the event of the outside, the Third! Hence, the body must drift with gesturings. If we keep Agamben as guideless a guide that is not a guide, then we might see the event as a moment of finitude (end, limit, Proper, death, a retreat to <span class="lightEmphasis">éthos in its own éthea</span>, where one goes to die [yet be reborn?]).</p>
<p>Agamben is rereading Heidegger: “The finite [is] the <span class="lightEmphasis">end of the history of Being</span> ” (<span class="booktitle">Potentialities</span> 128-29); it’s the withdrawal of negativity. The tradition of philosophy - with its universe of discourses, its discursive, restricted economies - has reached its end. What remains - as a remainder from which to gesture - is “an untransmissible transmission that transmits nothing but itself” (133). A general.discursive.economy @Outside.BodyWithoutOrgans (in a threshold, the e-passage), of gesturing <span class="lightEmphasis">alongside</span> the former restricted discursive economy in the inside of meaning that is, once again, facing its radical finitude. Agamben writes: “Gesture is always the gesture of being at a loss in language; it is always a ‘gag’ in the literal sense of the word, which indicates first of all something put in someone’s mouth to keep him from speaking and, then, the actor’s improvisation to make up for an impossibility of speaking” (78). Hence: either <span class="lightEmphasis">to communicate</span> (clearly, analytically) or <span class="lightEmphasis">to not communicate</span> yields a third alternative of <span class="lightEmphasis">to gesture</span> (the gag, asides).</p>
<p>But Agamben tells us that we have even lost our gestures (83), though they reappeared at Tiananmen. The students’ gestures were of a third type, which Agamben refers to as <span class="lightEmphasis">means without ends</span>. The students made no demands. But gestured. With a gesture that belongs to ethics and politics, to <span class="lightEmphasis">the relation of beings</span> (recall Heidegger’s <span class="booktitle">Time and Being</span>). Agamben explains that this third type requires setting aside the Aristotelian gesture of acting (<span class="foreignWord">agere</span>) and making (<span class="foreignWord">facere</span>), and taking up with the (Marcus) Varro.nian gesture of “something being endured and supported” (<span class="booktitle">Means</span> 56-57; cf. Nancy <span class="booktitle">Sense</span>, 103-17). Hence: either <span class="lightEmphasis">ends</span> (justifying means) or <span class="lightEmphasis">means</span> (justifying ends) yields to a third alternative of <span class="lightEmphasis">means without ends</span>, enduring and supporting.</p>
<p>” <span class="lightEmphasis">The new body of humanity</span> “:</p>
<p> T</p>
<p> h</p>
<p> i</p>
<p> s</p>
<p> =<br /> The new body is made up of, as Paul Mann might say “stupid undergrounds”: “Everything is a matter of coding and decoding, a semiocratic delirium, what Bataille calls, in deadly earnestness, parody as copula as the illicit copulation of facts: this = this = this. The chain of evidence is endless, and at every point it adds up to the missing-One” (162; cf., however, Ronell, who warns us of the dangers behind a stupidity of infinity).</p>
<p> T</p>
<p> h</p>
<p> i</p>
<p> s</p>
<p> </p>
<p>i</p>
<p>t</p>
<p> e</p>
<p> m</p>
<p> =<br /> the <span class="lightEmphasis">Net</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">Web</span> follow the paralogic of…WHATEVER! The Web is the easement. The site of in-difference to exclusion.</p>
<p> T</p>
<p> h</p>
<p> i</p>
<p> s</p>
<p> </p>
<p>i</p>
<p>t</p>
<p> e</p>
<p> m</p>
<p> =<br /> WHATEVERs prefer the coming community. In Be tween! In the “interworld” (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 97). In Limbo (5-7). Living there, abandoned by God and Satan, Media Generals and State Pedagogues, abandoned beyond good and evil, and with “guilt and justice behind them…the life that begins on earth after the last day is simply human [yet <span class="lightEmphasis">whatever</span> ] life” (6-7).</p>
<p> T</p>
<p> h</p>
<p> i</p>
<p> s</p>
<p> </p>
<p>i</p>
<p>t</p>
<p> e</p>
<p> m</p>
<p> =<br /> “The world is now and forever [either] necessarily contingent or contingently necessary. Between the <span class="lightEmphasis">not being able to not-be</span> that sanctions the decree of necessity and the <span class="lightEmphasis">being able to not-be</span> that defines fluctuating contingency, the finite world [finitude] suggests a contingency to the second [yet third alternative] power that does not found any freedom: It <span class="lightEmphasis">is capable of not not-being</span>, it is capable of the irreparable” (<span class="booktitle">Community</span> 40; Agamben’s emphasis. Cf. Nancy’s discussion “we <span class="lightEmphasis">are born free</span> ” in <span class="booktitle">Experience</span> 92).</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Agamben, Giorgio. <span class="booktitle">The Coming Community</span>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.</p>
<p>_____. <span class="booktitle">The Man Without Content</span>. Stanford UP, 1999.</p>
<p>_____. <span class="booktitle">Means Without Ends</span>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.</p>
<p>_____. <span class="booktitle">Potentialities</span>. Stanford UP, 1999.</p>
<p>Bataille, Georges. <span class="booktitle">The Accursed Share</span>. Vol. 1. NY: Zone, 1988.</p>
<p>Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication” in <span class="booktitle">The Anti-Aesthetic</span>. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay P, 1983. 126-34.</p>
<p>_____. <span class="booktitle">Transparency of Evil</span>. NY: Verso, 1993.</p>
<p>Burke, Kenneth. <span class="booktitle">A Grammar of Motives</span>. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.</p>
<p>Cixous, Hélène. <span class="booktitle">The Third Body</span>. Trans. Keith Cohen. Evanston: Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1999.</p>
<p>_____. <span class="booktitle">Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing</span>. Trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. NY: Columbia UP, 1993.</p>
<p>Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. <span class="booktitle">A Thousand Plateaus</span>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.</p>
<p>Hegel, G. W. F. <span class="booktitle">Phenomenology of Spirit</span>. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: The UP, 1977.</p>
<p>Heidegger, Martin. <span class="booktitle">On Time and Being</span>. NY: Harper, 1972.</p>
<p>_____. <span class="booktitle">What is Called Thinking?</span> NY: Harper and Row, 1968.</p>
<p>Kelly, Kevin. <span class="booktitle">Out of Control</span>. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994.</p>
<p>Leibniz, G. W. <span class="booktitle">Theodicy</span>. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.</p>
<p>Lyotard, Jean-François. <span class="booktitle">Libidinal Economy</span>. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.</p>
<p>Mann, Paul. <span class="booktitle">Masocriticism</span>. Albany: SUNY, 1999.</p>
<p>Marx, Karl. <span class="booktitle">Capital I</span>. Trans. Ben Fowkes. NY: Viking, 1977.</p>
<p>Nancy, Jean-Luc. <span class="booktitle">The Experience of Freedom</span>. Stanford UP, 1993.</p>
<p>_____. <span class="booktitle">The Inoperative Community</span>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.</p>
<p>_____. <span class="booktitle">The Sense of the World</span>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.</p>
<p>Ronell, Avital. “The Uninterrogated Question of Stupidity.” <span class="journaltitle">Differences</span> 8.2 (Summer 1996): 1-19.</p>
<p>Vitanza, Victor J. “The Hermeneutics of Abandonment.” <span class="journaltitle">Parallax</span> 4.4 (1998): 123-39.</p>
<p>_____. <span class="booktitle">Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric</span>. Albany: SUNY, 1997.</p>
<p>Wall, Thomas Carl. <span class="booktitle">Radical Passivity</span>. Albany: SUNY, 1999.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/heidegger">heidegger</a>, <a href="/tags/lyotard">lyotard</a>, <a href="/tags/agamben">agamben</a>, <a href="/tags/hegel">hegel</a>, <a href="/tags/economy">economy</a>, <a href="/tags/nation-state">nation-state</a>, <a href="/tags/capital">capital</a>, <a href="/tags/capitalism">capitalism</a>, <a href="/tags/leibniz">leibniz</a>, <a href="/tags/bataille">bataille</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a>, <a href="/tags/deleuze">deleuze</a>, <a href="/tags/cixous">cixous</a>, <a href="/tags/marx">marx</a>, <a href="/tags/libidinal-economy">libidinal economy</a>, <a href="/tags/general-economy">general economy</a>, <a href="/tags/genus">genus</a>, <a href="/tags/species">species</a>, <a href="/tags/burke">burke</a>, <a href="/tags/subjectivity">subjectivity</a>, <a href="/tags/hermeneutics">hermeneutics</a>, <a href="/tags/tiananmen-square">tiananmen square</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-mann">paul mann</a>, <a href="/tags/jean-luc">jean-luc</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator898 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/libidinal#comments